About Population Policy

The National Family Planning Program of China 1995-2000

(www.unescap.org)
Updated: 2010-08-20 15:07

X. Strengthen Leadership and Adopt an Integrated Approach to Family Planning

(35) Serious efforts should be made to implement and improve the responsibility system for the population plan and family planning program management by objectives. Leading officials of the Party and Government at various levels should personally take overall charge of and be held responsible for the family planning work. Leading groups for population and family planning work should be established and efforts made to improve their work and help coordinate between various departments concerned in a joint effort to ensure the success of the family planning program. A scientific system of responsibilities and objectives should be established and methods of evaluation and examination worked out in order to guide the sound development of family planning work. A family planning responsibility system should also be introduced into enterprises whose legal representatives are put in overall charge of promoting family planning.

(36) Governments at various levels should use all kinds of methods to help the Party members and cadres, especially those above the county level, to study Marxist theories on population conscientiously and acquire knowledge on population and family planning. They should help them foster a keen awareness of population issues and of per capita share of resources as well as the idea that population growth should be coordinated with socio-economic development, the utilization of resources and the environment. Party organizations and personnel departments at all levels should take family planning work as one of the major factors in evaluating the performance of leading cadres at various levels during their terms of office. A system of rewards and penalties should be established, under which those who have done a good job in family planning will be rewarded and those who have neglected their duties will be punished.

(37) All social sectors should pay attention and give great support to family planning and take the implementation of the basic national policy of family planning as their unshakable duty. Policies, laws and regulations formulated by various departments on social welfare, labor and employment and other aspects of social life should be conducive to encouraging later marriages and later childbearing, fewer and healthier births. Local authorities and departments concerned should, under the unified leadership of the government and the super-vision of the people's congress, conscientiously perform their duties in family planning, bring their respective strength into play and adopt effective measures in a common effort to make family planning work a success.

(38) Efforts should be made to give the Marriage Law wide publicity, make pre-marriage education universal and strengthen the management of marriage registration in accordance with the Regulation on the Management of Marriage Registration to prevent early marriage and early birth or birth out of wedlock. The Law on the Protection of the Rights and Interests of Women should be given greater publicity and women's legitimate rights and interests in education, labor, employment and participation in social activities and marriage as well as family life should be safeguarded. Efforts should be made to constantly enhance women's status and encourage them to devote themselves to the socialist modernization drive. Maternal and child health care should be improved to ensure healthier births and the better rearing and education of children. Constant efforts should be made to promote the health of women and infants and put an end to the infanticide and abandonment of girl babies. Social security systems should be established and improved gradually and a variety of insurance for family planning and the aged should be promoted. In urban area childbearing insurance for women may be practiced on a trial basis. Poverty alleviation programs should be combined with family planning. While supporting poverty-stricken areas in their economic development, we should help them work out population plans and ensure the success of their family planning measures.

(39) Efforts should be made to adapt family planning to the changing situation of reform and opening up to the outside world and an emerging socialist market economy, and integrate family planning with economic development, with income-generating projects and with efforts to refine family life and make it more enjoyable, deepen the reform on family planning so as to coordinate population growth with the socio-economic development, resources and the environment.

(40) Friendly cooperation with international organizations and governments of various countries should be strengthened and the advanced experience and technologies of other countries should be assimilated to help improve China's family planning work. Publicity aimed at the overseas audience should be launched through various media to introduce to the international community China's achievements and experience in carrying out family planning and coordinating population growth with socio-economic development, resources and the environment.